Technology Trends Driving eGaming in 2026

Gene Grand has spent enough time in eGaming and technology investment to be wary of the word " disruption. " It gets applied to almost everything and ends up meaning very little. But the combination of forces reshaping the gaming industry right now is something he takes seriously. This is not a story about better graphics or faster load times. The changes underway are structural, affecting how games are built, how they reach players, and who those players are .

Global gaming revenue reached $183.9 billion in 2023. Newzoo forecasts that figure growing to $207 billion by 2026. The number itself is less interesting to Gene than what is driving it. A meaningful share of that growth is coming from first-time players reached through platforms and price points that did not exist five years ago.

Cloud Gaming and the Hardware Question

For most of gaming's history, access has been tied to hardware. If you wanted to play, you needed a console or a gaming PC, and both required meaningful upfront investment. Cloud gaming breaks that dependency. Processing happens in a remote data centre- the player receives a stream. Almost any screen with a decent internet connection becomes a viable platform.

" Technology tends to affect the sector in two different ways. On the surface, it improves existing capabilities. Graphics improve, systems become more efficient. The deeper change is structural. Cloud infrastructure removes the hardware barrier, and AI allows experiences to be tailored at a scale that was not previously possible. Those two things together are changing who can participate in this market. "

Microsoft's numbers bear this out. Xbox Cloud Gaming hours among Game Pass subscribers were up 45 per cent year on year in 2025, and a notable portion of that increase came from players outside the traditional console market. That last point matters. The growth is not simply existing players migrating between formats.

On the commercial side, the subscription model is benefiting directly. Removing the need for large downloads and hardware cycles reduces the friction involved in signing up and staying subscribed. Xbox Game Pass reached 34 million subscribers by February 2024. That is a substantial installed base for a model that was relatively nascent only a few years earlier.

What AI Is Actually Changing in Development

Artificial intelligence tends to get discussed in gaming in terms of smarter enemies or more realistic behaviour. Genes interest is in something less visible: what it is doing to the economics of making games. Dynamic difficulty adjustment is one part of it, games that read how a player is performing and adjust the experience accordingly. But the bigger shift is procedural content generation.

No Man's Sky is the example Gene returns to most often. The game uses algorithmic systems to generate planets, ecosystems, and environments at a scale that would be physically impossible to build by hand. Eighteen quintillion planets. The development team was small. That ratio is only possible because the content is generated rather than constructed, and the principle is now being adopted across a much wider range of games and studios.

" AI is changing the economics of development. You can create personalised experiences for millions of players without building millions of individual assets . For studios that adopt this early, it is a competitive advantage, not just a production efficiency. "

Virtual Reality- Progress and an Unresolved Problem

Gene's view on VR is more measured than the enthusiasm that tends to surround the format. Meta's Quest headsets had reached approximately 20 million cumulative sales by early 2023, which is genuine scale. Social platforms built around persistent virtual environments have developed real, active communities. Gaming in those spaces is a different kind of experience, built around shared presence rather than individual play.

The problem is retention. A high proportion of headset owners use them intensively for a period and then stop. Gene does not read this as evidence that VR has a fixed ceiling. He reads it as an unsolved product problem. The hardware is capable. The content and social infrastructure have not yet caught up with what the hardware can offer.

Mobile- Large, Competitive, and Still Growing

Mobile is the largest segment in the industry and the one where the competitive pressure is most intense. Continued improvements in smartphone hardware have steadily narrowed the gap with console and PC in terms of what is possible. Genshin Impact gives a clear sense of the commercial scale involved. Business of Apps puts its revenue at $1.3 billion in 2023 , falling to $710 million in 2024 as competition in the genre increased. A significant decline, but still a number that commands attention.

What Gene takes from all of this is that these developments are not running in parallel, to be evaluated separately. Cloud infrastructure, AI-driven production, and the evolution of immersive formats are all reshaping the same market at the same time. The investors and operators who understand how those forces connect are the ones Gene expects to build durable positions in the industry over the next several years.